SSD, i-RAM and Traditional Hard Disk Drives. Page 11

In this article we are going to introduce to you two solid state drives from Samsung and a unique data storage solution from Gigabyte aka i-RAM. Let check out their performance compared to that of conventional hard disk drives.

Performance in FC-Test

Now we will check performance of the hard disk drives with the FC-Test program whose results are closer to real applications than the results of purely synthetic benchmarks. Two 32GB partitions are created on the drives and formatted in NTFS and then in FAT32. After that a file-set is created of the hard disk. It is then read from the disk, copied within the same partition and then copied into another partition. The time taken to perform these operations is measured and the speed of the drive is calculated.

The Gigabyte i-RAM having a capacity of 4GB only, we only checked out its read and write speed (FC-Test needs larger partitions for the copy tests than what can be created on this drive).

To remind you, the Windows and Programs file-sets consist of a large number of small files whereas the other three patterns (ISO, MP3, and Install) include a few large files each.

This test produces too much data, so we will only discuss the results of the Install, ISO and Programs patterns which illustrate the most characteristic use of the drives.

NTFS File System

Yes, writing is the hardest operation for SSDs. They are far slower than the others here. The Fujitsu MBA3300RC has a surprisingly low speed which must be due to the controller’s operation with SAS drives (other HDDs with the SAS interface are just as slow on this controller). As you might have expected, the Gigabyte i-RAM wins this test with a large lead.

The read speed of the SSDs corresponds to their results in WinBench 99 rather than in IOMeter: Sequential Read. The SSDs are both about as fast as the Hitachi 7K200. Note that their performance does not depend as much on the size of the processed file as with the HDDs. It is because of the file size that the Hitachi 7K200 is considerably faster in the ISO pattern but slower in the Programs pattern. In the same manner, the Fujitsu MBA3300RC overtakes the Gigabyte i-RAM on large files but loses to it on small files.

There are a couple of more things to be noticed: the SSDs have similar speeds of processing files although they differed in IOMeter. And the 64GB model is the faster one here. It’s also interesting that the SSDs cope with small files better. This must be due to the lack of buffer memory.

The speed of writing affects the results of copying within the same partition. That’s why the SSDs are slow irrespective of the file-set.

The SSDs are the slowest drives again – copying from one partition to another is not a better load for them.